format like new win 2000

[Guest]

I was running win 2000 but i want to completly format my hard drive so that nothing is on it and can start from scratch. I will probably put win 98 on it after that. The thing is I can only format sections of the hard drive that the OS is not on. please Help.. is there a utility out there... maybe i'll even put lenex on it....?

 

[blue_heart]

if you want to format you entire hard disk (even the operating system) then use win98 bootable disk and the change the bios to be the flopy disk first bootable device and insert the win98boot disk and restart, then format all your partitions then start the win98 setup

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Your best choice is to start with Windows 98. I would partition and format the drive in fdisk for Windows 98 and then do the install. Once you are done with Win98 you can just boot to the Windows 2000 or Linux CD and do the Install of one of those Operating System's. You can create the partitions from 2000 and Linux from the install CD.

The reason you want to install Win98 first is because it doesn't have a boot manager unlike Win 2000 and Linux. One thing to keep in mind, if you are going to dual boot with Linux and Win98 you need to make sure you partition size for both the OS's doesn't exceed 8GB. Lilo has a limitation of 8GB.

<font color=red>1GHz AMD x MSI K7T-Turbo x 512MB PC133 x 2-Maxtor 30GB/RAID 0 = Stream Line Butterfly</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

The problem is that I can not access any ntfs hard drive space. win 2000 will not let me change the os portion of the HD back to fat 32. I can access D: with the win 98 boot disk but not C:
thank you for t he help

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Ok so if I understand correctly you just want to get rid of everything and install Windows 98. If the partition is NTFS boot to the startup disk and access Fdisk. Within Fdisk choose option 3 (Delete partition or logical dos drive), then select option 4 to delete a Non dos partition. Once you have deleted the partition re-create it in fdisk and then all you will have to do is format it after a restart.

<font color=red>1GHz AMD x MSI K7T-Turbo x 512MB PC133 x 2-Maxtor 30GB/RAID 0 = Stream Line Butterfly</font color=red>